The Goat, the Crescent Moon, and the Dying Children
A horned goat crowned in oak leaves presides over a moonlit gathering of witches — and at its feet lie the bodies of infants. Goya painted it for a duchess in 1798, and it still unsettles.
In the barren, moon-washed landscape of Francisco Goya's 1798 canvas, a monstrous goat sits enthroned among a coven of witches, young and old. Its horns are enormous, its head wreathed in oak leaves like some perverse crown. This is Satan, or a stand-in for him, presiding over what the painting's Spanish title calls an aquelarre — a witches' sabbath.
The scene is not merely eerie; it is horrifying in its particulars. To the right, an old crone holds an emaciated but still-living infant toward the goat, while a younger witch beside her offers a healthier child, as if in warning of the fate awaiting it. The Devil appears to act almost as an officiant, presiding over what looks like some grim initiation rite. Popular superstition of the era held that the Devil fed on children and unborn fetuses, and Goya leaned into that fear without flinching.
The painting does not spare the viewer further horrors: the dead body of an infant lies discarded on the left, while in the center foreground another child's legs are pinned to the ground, seemingly by a younger witch. In the background, more witches gather, and three dead infants hang by the neck from a stake. Overhead, bats wheel through the sky, their flight echoing the curve of a crescent moon that faces outward from the canvas's upper left corner — itself an inversion of expected symbolism, just as the goat extends its left hoof rather than its right toward the child before it.
Goya painted this canvas as part of a set of six works on witchcraft, purchased in 1798 by the Duke and Duchess of Osuna. It is believed that the duchess, rather than her husband, was behind the acquisition, though whether the paintings were commissioned outright or simply bought once finished remains unknown. Whatever the arrangement, an aristocratic household wanted these nightmarish images on its walls.
This was not the only time Goya returned to the imagery of the coven. Decades later, among his so-called Black Paintings, he painted another Witches' Sabbath, also called The Great He-Goat, between 1821 and 1823. The recurrence suggests the subject held a persistent grip on his imagination — or that it remained a useful vessel for ideas he wanted to express indirectly.
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